


Let There Be a Bruise

by audreycritter



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Fevers, Gen, Scars, TW: Past Abuse, father-son bonding, the Christmas fic that nobody asked for and isn’t even a Christmas fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 10:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13121673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Damian is a child who should not have the scars he does; Bruce is a father who has plenty of his own scars, but still wishes he could take his son’s, too.The silver lining is where they find each other— a broken son and a broken father, putting each other back together.





	Let There Be a Bruise

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Falling Up’s “Bruise.”
> 
> Thanks to jerseydevious for workshop help.

The carpet fibers were too prickly under his bare feet and the cool bathroom tiles were only three or four meters away, but it might as well have been a mile. Damian Wayne was motionless, halfway between his bed and bathroom, the polished wood of desk slick under his sweating palm. He’d braced himself there when he stumbled, biting the inside of his cheek to hold back a cry; tangy blood poured into his mouth, coating his teeth with the slippery film of it. White-hot rebar had replaced his spine and he was stuck. Even with gritted teeth, moving wasn’t an option— his legs wouldn’t obey him over the roar of his shrieking nerves. 

Standing still wasn’t an option, either, and with every second that passed he leaned more heavily on the desk. He closed his eyes and saw the ceiling of the room where he’d woken after many of the surgeries his mother had organized. He opened his eyes and saw how far away the bathroom remained.

The more he leaned on the desk, the more his back and leg protested. The carpet under one heel was growing damp and he risked a glance down, craning his neck and choking on an involuntary shriek at the movement. There was a puddle of blood soaking the beige carpet, seeping from his calf. He kept forgetting _it_ was hurt, too, it’s why he’d forced himself out of bed.

His knees were going to give out soon and he switched his focus to bracing himself for the jolt against his spine when he hit the floor.

The soft rain blew against the windows with gusts of wind and he tried to listen, tried to think about something else. The cool winter air would feel so good on his hot face, so he visualized it. He’d straighten and walk to the window, throw it open, lean out into the spray. 

His hand slid an inch on the desk and the abrupt shift drew a sharp gasp from his dry throat. 

And then, not at the pain but at the _fairness_ of it and his own helplessness to protest that, tears sprang to his eyes. This was his punishment for…for who he was, for all of it. There were many situations where he could hold his head high and speak with authority.

This was not one of them.

He had no right to order this—the failure of his body— to stop. He had no grounds on which to plead for mercy. 

Damian couldn’t even lift his hand to scrub a stray tear away, not without upsetting his precarious balance.

The bedroom door swung open without a knock of warning. 

“Damian?” 

He tried to answer, to insist he was okay, but all that came out was a faint moan.

There was no second calling of his name. Air moved in the room and when Damian opened his eyes (when had he closed them? When?), his father was directly in front of him, crouching so he was a little below Damian’s direct eye level.

“Talk to me, son.” Father was studying him, sight raking up and down Damian hunting for clues. Damian’s stubborn and stupid tongue tried to find words, and Father’s eyes hit the puddle of blood.

For the fraction of a second, the unusual open concern vanished into something darker and stormy, then flickered away again. It was like stumbling into a forgotten closet in the massive house and turning the light off, then on again for a second look.

“I…” Damian licked his lips. Water. He wanted water so desperately, the rain on the window was torturous. “…my leg. Missed, uh…”

This was not how a good report went. Quickly cataloging his successes and failures was a skill he’d learned early on, honed once living as Robin.

A wrist, rough and stuttered with scarring, pressed against his forehead. Damian jerked back at the cold contact, his spine screamed at the motion, and his teeth reflexively bit the tender, swollen inside of his cheek. He could feel the blood at the corner of his mouth, trickling down.

Father’s eyes widened and he tensed, all over.

“Not…emergency. Not an emergency,” Damian choked out before Father did something drastic. “Bit my cheek. Cut my…leg. Last night. Didn’t…”

Why was it so hard to talk? It wasn’t his mouth. He closed his eyes to think, to focus. Father needed a comprehensive report so he’d know Damian was okay, that this was all just a small problem with…

What _had_ happened? His hand slipped another inch on the desk and Father caught his shoulders. Father’s hands were shaking— no, he was shaking, all over. His chin felt damp and he didn’t know if it was blood or tears.

“Damian?”

A report.

“Didn’t notice my leg,” Damian said. Was he in a tunnel? His voice sounded so far away. “Need…to clean it…”

“I’m going to pick you up,” Father said. 

“No!” The shrill note stopped Father’s hands from moving. It was tears, lots of them, making his face wet— he was sure now. He didn’t even know when he’d started crying. “Don’t…I can…”

The hands bracing his shoulders let go slowly, letting him adjust to his own weight again. He’d shut his eyes again at some point but he could hear Father walking away.

Why had he been so stupid? Grayson was always telling him it was okay to ask for help. And Father had been _right_ there and now he was leaving because Damian said he could do it on his own, he was _always_ saying he could do things on his own. The bathroom was still so far away and there was blood all over the bed to clean up and…

A small moan escaped him. At least Father had already left so he didn’t—

“Shh,” Father said suddenly, from immediately in front of him again. A chilled washcloth scrubbed gently at the corner of his lip. 

“My back,” Damian said, the words tight and thin. “It hurts.”

“You have a fever,” Father said quietly. “I need you to lie down. I’ll clean your leg.”

“Bed’s…there’s blood…” Damian swallowed and tried to shift a foot forward. Even with his eyes closed, an inkier blackness threatened to overwhelm him. 

“I’ll take care of it,” Father said. “I’m going to carry you to the bathroom for now. Can you manage a shower?”

“I don’t know,” Damian said, instead of _no_ , which felt more accurate. “I don’t know.”

“Shh, it’s alright,” Father said, like he was speaking to a small child. 

Why did he sound so— oh. Damian was still crying, crying more now. He could hear the keening sound in his own ears as if the noise were coming from a stranger.

“Please,” Damian said. “Please. _Please_.”

“Please what?” Father asked, abruptly. 

“I don’t know,” Damian pled. “I don’t— please, just…”

 _Make it stop_ , he realized, is what he wanted to ask and that didn’t make any sense, it couldn’t make sense, and still he wanted to ask.

“Damian, you have to tell me what—”

“Please,” Damian sobbed. _“Father.”_

There was a beat of silence in the room and then sudden motion, just at the rapidly shrinking edges of his perception. It was a rustle of fabric and a thrown open door and then hands guiding Damian’s arms up and around Father’s neck. Father was close, his mouth near Damian’s ear and breath warm on his skin, when he spoke.

“I’m going to move you to the bed; hold on and I’ll try to keep your spine as still as I can. Damian? Understand?”

Damian tried and failed to nod.

“Yes,” he choked out, tightening his arms as much as he dared.

Father’s arm was around his legs and he hesitated— a second, another second, three seconds. His face was so close to Damian’s own that Damian could hear the soft exhale.

“Damian, hold as tight as you need.”

Slight pressure on his knees made them buckle and suddenly, he was in the air, against Father’s chest, being carried across the room into a blinding, screaming inferno of pain.

* * *

“Grayson?”

“No.”

“…Pennyworth?”

“No, again. Should I be concerned I wasn’t even in the first two guesses?”

Sleepy brown eyes blinked at him from beneath the damp rag Bruce was holding to Damian’s feverish brow.

“Father?”

“There you go.”

“Tt.”

With that, Damian fell back asleep. Between the fever and the medicine Bruce had gotten into him, he’d been slipping in and out of wakefulness for almost half an hour now. At least he seemed to be moving more, tossing and turning some without whimpering.

The scar line that ran up his back covered a metal frame that, as far as Bruce could guess, had expanded just enough with fever to put pressure on a nerve root. A mix of medicine, massaging, cool compresses, and movement seemed to have shifted things, because he wasn’t holding himself rigidly anymore. 

“Please,” Damian had said.

 _It hurts._

It might have been one of the starkest admissions of pain Bruce had ever heard from him. 

Bruce shifted his gaze to the window. Rain had turned to sleet and now pelted the glass, clouding the view of the distant trees. He took a slow breath, his sight fixed on the blurred canopy of leaves while he saw the crumbling brick and grimy street lamp of years ago.

A misfired trap of Nygma’s had thrown him against the building and he’d had to drag himself to the car, inch by inch, to sit in the seat and shiver with pain while it took him home to Alfred. That had only been weeks after coming back from the way Bane had snapped him like a twig, and wasn’t the first or only time.

But he had _asked_ for this. He had signed up for it, knew from the beginning it was what he was getting into, knew all the way back when he’d toured the world training and a teacher had fractured his left ulna just to remind him, _this is the beginning, this is the first step, it only gets harder from here: now, fight_. 

Bruce had consented to this.

The little boy bright-hot with fever had _not_.

His fist tensed around the washcloth he was wringing out, water dripping off his knuckles until the cloth was nearly dry beneath the pressure. 

“Father?”

In a breath, with a breath, with another breath— he smoothed out his expression and swallowed his rage to where it would sit, densely burning in his belly.

“Hm?” 

The small face turned to his and he refolded the washcloth, held it to Damian’s forehead again.

“I’m…it was foolish…that I…”

“Damian.”

Damian seemed more coherent this time, for all his fumbling words. His gaze was clearer and focused, studying Bruce’s face to gauge whatever he found there.

“I should have— it was infected, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Care to tell me what happened?”

The gash on Damian’s leg wasn’t especially deep or long, but it should have been sutured. Right now, it was cleaned and bandaged and waiting for the swelling to recede with antibiotics. 

“You won’t believe me,” Damian said.

“Tell me,” Bruce replied gently. The sting of Damian’s usual acerbic tone was still missing, wilted away by distracting pressures. 

“I didn’t notice it,” Damian said, rolling onto his side. He kept his eyes locked on Bruce’s, waiting. It was Bruce who gave up staring first, to flip the washcloth. He didn’t want Damian to see this as a challenge, as a test to pass.

“You didn’t?”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Damian spat, the venom fizzling out into a whining hiss only halfway through. 

“Did I say that?”

“No,” Damian muttered. “But I didn’t notice.”

“Alright,” Bruce said. 

“Sometimes I don’t notice,” Damian said, sharpness back. He was wasting energy trying to hold on to fight, but so limp and weak at the same time that Bruce didn’t even have to try to keep his temper in check.

This wasn’t a grown teenager screaming at him, pushing all his buttons in just the right way, so they’d both regret it later.

This was just a sick kid, a little boy, who had been given every reason in the world to be defensive to the last. 

“Alright,” Bruce said again. “I understand.”

“So it’s not— what?” 

Damian froze and glanced at him again.

“I understand.”

“I don’t always notice,” Damian said, suddenly small and quiet. “I don’t always…if it’s small, I had to…I used to have to…”

“Shh,” Bruce said, more to Damian’s mounting apparent distress than the words he was using. How many times had Alfred watched him unravel to bad memories when he’d been weakened by something else first?

Too many times to count.

And again, something he’d chosen.

This time, he left the washcloth in the small bowl of cool water and his hand squeezed his knee. His heart ached in a twisting, knotted way that caught his breath in his throat when Damian started to cry. His son was so _quiet_ ; the crook of his arm hiding his face from the world and the small shake of shoulders one of the few signs.

Damian cried like he knew he wasn’t allowed.

 _I wish I could carry this for you_ , Bruce thought, bitterly and desperately.

“M’sorry,” Damian croaked, every syllable hoarse and deep. 

“How’s your back?” Bruce asked.

“Better.” Damian nodded into his arm. 

“I’m going to pick you up.” 

There was no protest, so Bruce scooped Damian up off the bed and settled himself against the headboard, leaning back with Damian in his arms. The crying ebbed, still silent, and Bruce brushed Damian’s damp hair back, raking his fingers through the tangled locks over and over again, until they smoothed out.

Damian was still trembling with fever, slumped against him, every limb tense. Bruce rubbed a hand up and down his back, and he relaxed a little, but not entirely.

There were some tensions that were not so easy to undo.

“When I was younger,” Bruce began. He had to clear his throat, to chase away the numb slowness of his mouth. “I came back one night and went to bed. I woke up two days later, full of drugs. Alfred was furious. No— he was worried. I’d overlooked a knife wound and it had gotten infected, fast.”

Damian shifted, his face pressed against Bruce’s chest, his breathing shallow and shaky. 

“I’d learned to ignore a lot of pain. But we need—pain is useful. It tells us when to stop.”

“You don’t listen,” Damian said.

“No, not usually.” Bruce buried his wry smile in a kiss to Damian’s head.

“Where?”

“The stab wound?”

“Tt.”

“Here.” Bruce sat Damian up and twisted around, pushing his sleeve out of the way to show the jagged ridge on the back of his upper arm. Damian leaned forward to look and Bruce had to crane his own head to see it at all.

Damian pressed himself back against Bruce’s chest and held out his own arm. The soft cotton tee he was wearing didn’t cover the dots of pale, knotted scar; he tapped them, one after the other, with a slender, brown finger. 

“Snake bite. I had to let it bite me before a hike. The antivenom was at the other end. The lesson was ignoring my body’s weaker reactions to focus on a goal.”

The anger that had been sitting in Bruce’s stomach, coiled like a snake itself, rose with a sharp strike and he swallowed bile. The sting of the bite, the heat of the wound, the sweat sticky under his wool cap, the burn in his blood, and weight on his chest, the certainty: _I’m going to die out here, alone_. It all came back in a heartbeat and he stared down at the fang marks on Damian’s arm.

For several minutes, he wouldn’t let himself speak, afraid of how he would sound and how Damian would hear it. He couldn’t.

Finally, he managed: “I did that.”

Damian started against him and then tilted his head back to look up, surprised and steady, at Bruce, for five seconds stretching out into thirty seconds. The arch of his eyebrow would have made Alfred proud. Then, he dropped his chin and tucked himself in against Bruce. 

“Grayson said my training was torture.”

“It was,” Bruce agreed, feeling a twinge of relief that this perspective was trodden ground for Damian. 

“But you—”

“You didn’t choose it,” Bruce said, roughly. He took a breath, filling his lungs; he let it all out slow, counting the seconds in his head. He’d never_— never—_put Dick or any of his Robins through some of the things he’d survived. He knew he’d been hard on them, but there were lines he wouldn’t cross. “I chose to do it. You weren’t given a choice.”

There were some things you didn’t ask of a child.

Even if you were trying to keep them alive.

Damian was quiet. His body felt warm, too warm still. Feverish.

Bruce ran his fingers over the pocked scars on Damian’s arm. He tried not to think about climbing hand over hand up unyielding rock, palms slick with venomous fever. He tried not to think about the agony of losing ground to a fall, to knowing no one was coming to save him if he didn’t get up.

On an impulse, he lifted the arm and kissed the scars. The scars he hadn’t known to save him from, back then. 

“You didn’t deserve this, Damian.”

Damian pressed his face into Bruce’s shirt and exhaled. When he spoke, it was so quiet Bruce almost didn’t hear him.

“I’m not good, like you.”

The whisper hit harder than most bullets; it knocked the wind right out of him, left him tumbling on the asphalt.

“I’m not…”

_…good._

He caught himself, he dragged himself back up, he threw his own demons out the window. He took Damian’s chin and turned his face so their eyes met.

“You are good.”

_You’re a thing of beauty, a stubborn and perfect heart. You find treasures for other people in the sewers, you put your soul on canvas, you have every reason to hate the world forever and you’re gentle, fragile hope instead._

Whatever Damian made of his expression, he wasn’t sure— but Damian’s eyes widened and he ducked his head away with a small sniff.

“You _are_ good, and you didn’t deserve any of that,” Bruce said fiercely, begging inside for the boy to just hear him, believe it, accept it. 

“So are you,” Damian said stubbornly. 

Bruce bit back the argument that rose at that, because he knew he couldn’t afford to lose any ground on this front.

“I should check your leg,” Bruce said instead, his arms tight around Damian’s narrow shoulders. He didn’t move to let go or let him up. “It’s probably time for more medicine.”

“I’m okay,” Damian said, his hand holding Bruce’s arm in place. “For a little longer.”

“Hn.” Bruce adjusted his back against the headboard. 

Dick had been a natural at childhood and even tragedy hadn’t taken that from him, not the way it had for Bruce. Bruce had limped along through the rest of adolescence feeling misplaced, until Dick had come along and stirred something long-sleeping in his heart. It was the stuff of pillow forts and snowball fights and hide-and-seek, stretching out into the years when they were _both_ too old for it, before Dick grew again and stopped insisting.

It had prepared him for Jason, who came to him at the edge of that transition away; Tim had never wanted or needed it, or if he had, he’d sought out other things with Bruce. He’d found the remaining years of his childhood somewhere else. 

_For a little longer._

Damian was so young, and for every year of age he had a thousand gaps, a thousand missed opportunities. Dick probably had a list, of experiences to fill in, items to check off in rectifying what he could. 

When was the last time Bruce had thrown a baseball? Sprawled on roof tiles to stargaze and talk to a son until dawn? He rested his chin on Damian’s hair, now stiff with dried sweat and smelling of oil, of antiseptic, of men’s sandalwood soap. 

Never child’s soap, like strawberry or orange coconut. 

“Tt,” Damian said, soft and sleepy. 

Bruce looked down without lifting his head, to where his thumb was absently rubbing the snake bite scars. He paused and shifted his hand, turned his arm over.

“Sorry. Look,” he said. Damian roused just enough that Bruce thought he was looking. He couldn’t see his face. There were specks of scar near the inside of Bruce’s elbow. “We match.”

“Tt,” Damian said. “You’re…bigger.”

Bruce jostled him, just slightly. “Don’t get technical with me. When you feel well again, we’re going sledding. This sleet should be snow by then.”

His joints all said so, every one. 

“I know,” Damian said, sleepier still. “My knee aches.”

“We’ll have to be old men together. Grumble at Dick.”

_We need to be children together. We’re missing pieces._

“Grayson is a child.”

“Hm,” Bruce nodded into Damian’s hair. “He is. Hot cocoa after sledding. Alfred makes good marshmallows.”

“I like marshmallows,” Damian said. “Only Pennyworth’s, though. Others have an unpleasant aftertaste.”

“I know,” Bruce said. “I think so, too.”

_We have so much in common and I don’t want it to be just the wounds that have marked us. I want you to have more than that, more of me than that. I’ll take anything, even marshmallows._

“Damian?”

“Father?” 

He sounded almost asleep, like he was fighting to stay awake. He really was too warm. Maybe if Alfred came up, he could get medicine into him without moving. 

“Don’t worry about it. We can talk later.”

Maybe while watching the stars.


End file.
